Fred asks where Lewis makes the distinction between Bards and Actors with regard to the recitation of poetry. As quoting from memory is a hazard with me, I went to find the original source, and discovered that that distinction is between Minstrels and Actors. Close … ah well.

The citation is Lewis’s essay entitled “Metre,” which I have in a volume called Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge UP, 1969). I had hoped to find it reprinted in the recent (2002, paperback) essay collection Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, but it isn’t, at least not in the British edition (HarperCollins). We really do need a uniform scholarly edition of the complete works–but I digress. Here’s the relevant passage from the Cambridge UP volume:

Unfortunately, even after we have ruled out gross barbarisms, there remain different and defensible ways of reading poetry aloud and they do not coincide with differences of opinion about metre. The two main schools may be called Minstrels and Actors. They differ about the proper relations between the noises they make and something else; that something else being the thing we are looking for, namely metre. Minstrels, singing or intoning, make their utterance conform to this, leaving you to imagine the rhythm and tempo which the words would have in ordinary speech. Actors give you that rhythm and tempo out loud, leaving you to imagine the metre. Yet both may be fully agreed as to what the metre is. They differ by deliberately making, or refusing to make, an imaginary archetype or paradigm actual. This paradigm is metre. Scansion is the conformity, made audible by Minstrels and concealed by Actors, of the individual line to this paradigm. (280)

In ADAD 16 (below) I attempt to move back along that continuum in the direction of the Minstrels.

I may simply claim a scholar’s prerogative and change Lewis’s terms to what my faulty memory originally produced, since the word “minstrels” does not connote the same thing in American English as it does in other English-speaking cultures.

Quite a philosophical romp this time, as well as an unusually long ADAD podcast: upwards of fifteen minutes (you have been warned). The poem takes up most of that time, though I confess I found myself warming to the explication as I went along. You may be the judge of whether that process produces more light than heat.

Responding to a private email from Andrew T. in Monash, I comment on the issue of two ways of reading Donne’s poetry: for the syntax, and for the line. Today’s poem doesn’t force that choice quite so starkly upon the reader as some other of Donne’s lyrics do, but even at that a tension remains between trying to make sense of Donne’s syntax (which weaves, sometimes tortuously, from line to line) and emphasizing Donne’s lines, principally by a) signalling the line’s end and b) giving a little more weight to the end rhymes. Before tonight I had been trying hard to read for syntax, reasoning that Donne was so difficult that reading for the line would make the reading less intelligible. Andrew’s email made me rethink that strategy, and indeed if a short enough lyric presents itself, I may try reading both ways and invite (copious) comment on the results.

C. S. Lewis distinguished two types of poetry recitation: the Bard (edit: no, he calls it “Minstrel”) and the Actor. The Bard, at its bardiest, is something like the heavily incantatory recitation of a W. B. Yeats, as in this excerpt from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The Actor does not treat the poem as an incantation, but is likely to de-emphasize or even ignore the formal aspects of the verse in an effort to get to the sense. As Lewis argues, and as Andrew reminds me, these are extreme positions. Moreover, any lover of poetry (will the guilty parties please raise their hands) must admit that the formal aspects of the verse are inextricably tied to the semantic weight of the verse (or, indeed, vice-versa).

The matter becomes extremely difficult at time in Donne, whose “strong” lines (as they were called by older critics) are at times metrically crabbed or metrically ambiguous. Reading for the form can obscure the sense if one is not careful. Ah, but such care is no doubt part of what Donne sought to encourage by writing as he did. Keep the music, the polemic, the arch self-awareness, and the zealous intensity all in a carefully taut matrix. Something like life.

Martha Burtis once did some very smart and thoughtful (and poetic) work on understanding Donne’s reflexivity by means of the literary theorist and linguistic philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. I wish she’d put her paper online. It deserves to be read again.

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IBM’s ThinkPad X41 Tablet PC is here, if not quite in the shops, and one early review (at MIT’s Technology Review) is quite positive.

I’ve been a tablet fan for some time now, and I welcome IBM’s entry into the market. I’m also very intrigued by the biometrics built in to this model. Apparently the fingerprint recognition works quite well and obviates the need for a series of logon passwords. (Should give hand-washing a boost as well.)

Ernie blogs on an interesting piece by Laura Turner, “20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have.” As Ernie notes, Turner’s links point to valuable (and, I hope, persistent) resources and tutorials for understanding and acquiring these skills.

Turner describes the list as “comprehensive,” which is a little bolder than I would be given the rapid pace of change in the digital world, but it’s certainly a fine starting place. I might replace the PDA item with one on multimedia authoring, though. Are there certain core concepts involved with manipulating audio, video, and still images that could usefully be aggregated? Web 2.0 means we’ll have to answer that question sooner rather than later. Anecdotal evidence: this year my first-year students were markedly more web-pervaded than my fourth-year students. That doesn’t mean they were more sophisticated in their thinking, it just means their horizon of expectations was in a different place–a place we should be prepared to journey to ourselves. Quick, trivial, but perhaps telling example: many of my seniors didn’t know about Bananaphone, but most of my freshmen did. Why? Because the younger students live on, and in, the Web.

Not to be confused with “The First Anniversarie,” a completely different poem, “The Anniversarie” celebrates what I take to be the first anniversary of Donne’s marriage to Ann Donne. No one knows which, if any, of Donne’s Songs and Sonnets are addressed to or inspired by his wife, so perhaps I may be forgiven my speculation. Note that this perfect kingdom has two monarchs. Presumably they reign over each other, as well as over the faithful subjects who look to them as examples of a perfected love.

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Of the many poems in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, this is the only one written from the point of view and in the voice of the female beloved. Lyrical, pragmatic, accusatory, and poignant, this poem demonstrates Donne’s self-awareness as he imagines the charges his beloved could bring against him.

Enjoy.

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University Channel is a Princeton project uniting a blog, webcasts and other video content from several universities, and now a podcast service. The recent, accelerating convergence of streaming, download, RSS, the blogosphere, and podcasting has coincided very nicely with this service’s official launch (the mission statement on their blog dates from December, 2003). I immediately ask, “is the University Channel podcast in the iTunes podcast directory?” The answer: yes. Search on “University Channel” and there it is.

Thanks to the Chronicle for the alert (subscription required).

There’s lots to argue about and mull over in this famously difficult lyric. My commentary advances one view, and I hope it’s coherent and plausible, but I’m sure it is not definitive. The enigmas will outlive us all.

Parallelism, or chiasmus? You be the judge.

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Or, more accurately, Hugh Blackmer on a powerful enabler of real school:

It’s not that we need to find the one best way of presenting information, but that the presentation should be easily [re]configurable to suit the user’s needs, preferences, purposes. User Interface is surely as much a conceptual problem as a design problem or a matter of hardware contingencies.

The intersection of pedagogy/cognitive science with UI: X marks the spot, or one spot … a place to start digging, or building … arrange the metaphors like facets in a diamond, both to gather and scatter the light.

Can we find a Theory of Everything that preserves both the One and the Many? That’s the kind of question that makes a few of my readers gnash their teeth, and perhaps even charge me with “being literary.” Well, guilty: You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. (And I’m not even sure that’s a good song–but it’s salutary to have that line juxtaposed with another bit of truthtelling from Lennon’s work: “No one I think is in my tree; I mean it must be high or low.”)

Or maybe I need Walt Whitman: “Failing to find me at first, keep encouraged.”

Or perhaps Doug Engelbart, again, and always:

We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

I repeat myself to remind myself: a liberal arts education ought to be the best opportunity for imagining and crafting, privately and in community, just such an integrated domain.

My son taught me about fan fiction, an Internet genre I find fascinating–although the concept is more interesting to me right now than the examples I’ve seen. Doesn’t matter: if the idea is interesting, there’s bound to be some stellar instances.

Tonight I discovered the intriguing world of recaps, where people write long and detailed accounts of television episodes. These are not summaries or synopses. They’re chronicles. I’m only at the entryway, but it seems as if recappers (no doubt they have a cooler confraternal word for themselves) even compete with each other to see who can craft the most engaging and compelling recaps. One I perused included a running editorial/one-liner/aside commentary within the recap itself, sort of like a Mystery Science Theater 3000 without directing all the sarcasm at the episode. (These are fans, after all, not camp aficionados per se.)

Recaps aren’t remixes. So what are they? Short-story-izations? And how would we use literary theory either to analyze or account for them? (That’s a semi-facetious question.)

One set of recaps: House, M.D. at “Television Without Pity.” Note the report cards and pull quotes.